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Intellectual Selection

“Trying to write intellectual history is like trying to nail jelly to a wall,” the historian William Hesseltine once observed. Standing hammer in hand, there are three obvious ways to grasp hold of this slippery subject. The first is to focus on the thinkers or, to continue the craftsman metaphor, the producers of the ideas. The second method is to concentrate on the genetic development of the ideas themselves, or the product. The third is to focus on the consumers; that is, to trace the transmission and interpretations of these ideas among the wider population.

In “Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America,” Barry Werth seeks to show how the concept of evolution evolved in the decades after the Civil War, to become a dominant lens through which Americans viewed their rapidly changing world. A slippery subject, indeed. But Werth, the author of “The Scarlet Professor” and several other books, takes firm hold by keeping a tight, almost cinematic, focus on the intellectual producers — the fossil-hunters, biologists, preachers, economists, historians, industrialists, politicians and editors — “who accepted the overall truth of gradual development as a principle of biological descent, but disagreed sharply among themselves on ­other essential questions, and on the deeper implications for society, and for God.”

Werth depicts these ferociously ambitious thinkers as engaged in a Darwinian fight to the finish, each vying to lay out the most persuasive theories and win the widest reputation. This apt fusion of form and content makes for a surprisingly suspenseful and fast-paced story. Werth effort­lessly brings each eccentric character to life through colorful details and well-chosen anecdotes, while taking us on a whirlwind tour of Gilded Age politics and society. “Banquet at Delmonico’s” crackles with energy and wit.

The central rivalry was between two English titans, the naturalist Charles Darwin and the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Although his reputation has been eclipsed by Darwin, Spencer published his “doctrine of development” two years before Darwin’s “Origin of Species” appeared in 1859. It was Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to refer to Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Darwin and Spencer shared two basic tenets. The first was the universality of conflict, or the belief that all beings are in competition for limited life-sustaining resources. The second was the principle of adaptation, that those beings who best adapt to their changing environment will be the ones most likely to dominate resources and to reproduce. For a generation raised to believe in a static and harmonic world, bound by the laws of nature and predetermined by God’s plans, these ideas were revolutionary.

Beyond this, however, the two men generally parted company. Darwin was a scientist and a ruthlessly inductive thinker who formulated his hypotheses over 25 years of painstaking observation of plants, animals and fossils. Spencer, by contrast, was a deductive polymath who prided himself on his ability to spin all-encompassing theories out of limited information. Spencer believed that his “universal law of evolution” could apply to everything in the cosmos, including human psychology, language, morality, race, government and society.

Photo

Herbert SpencerCredit
Illustration by Henrik Drescher

Perhaps their biggest difference, however, was the issue of teleology, or ­whether evolutionary development implied a design or purpose. “The forces behind Darwinian evolution were random, mindless, blind, but for Spencer survival of the fittest also meant survival of the best, suggesting a cosmic value system,” Werth writes. “Progress wasn’t accidental; it was imperative, even programmed.” As Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, philanthropist and Spencer acolyte, liked to say, “All is well since all grows better.” Or in the sharper tones of the Yale political economist William Graham Sumner, “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be.”

It was Spencer’s wide-ranging attempts to apply the concept of organic evolution to society, rather than Darwin’s more cautious and narrow theories of biological change, that caught fire in the competitive, by-your-own bootstraps atmosphere of post-Civil War America. As Edward Livingston Youmans, the founder of The Popular Science Monthly and Spencer’s main American promoter, often observed, much of what was called Darwinism in the United States should actually be called Spencerism. This was especially true of what has become known, often pejoratively, as “social Darwinism,” or “the anti-philanthropic, anti-meddling side” of Spencer’s legacy, in Youmans’s words. Even so, by 1880 Spencer’s American followers had declared victory over Darwin in the race for popular influence.

I am hesitant to complain of any book that could make the abstruse debates of a dozen dyspeptic eggheads read like an intellectual thriller. Werth is a gifted writer, and his subject is especially important in our current economic crisis, as Americans are reassessing their belief that social progress will grow naturally out of unfettered free-market competition.

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Yet complain I will. By keeping such tight hold on one portion of intellectual history — the thinkers thinking — Werth lets the other two aspects slip from his grasp: why and how average people absorbed these ideas into their lives and the worth of the ideas themselves. As a narrator, Werth never pauses the action long enough to step back, sum up and compare the barrage of complex and contradictory ideas. We never get the benefit of the historian’s broader perspective. This absence is especially odd because Werth is terrific at explaining on the fly. He nimbly leads us through many historical thickets, including the causes of the economic depression of the 1870s, the switchbacks of federal Indian policy, three thorny presidential elections and one presidential assassination.

The lack of extended asides matters less when discussing the relatively straightforward conflict between Darwinism and religion. The Deistic Darwinians state their position thus: “We know of old that God was so wise that he could make all things; but behold he is so much wiser than even that, that he can make all things make themselves.” To which the atheists and the Biblical literalists reply: “Well, I just don’t see it.” Another stalemate in the eternal battle between belief and unbelief.

But this lack of wider perspective matters a great deal as we get to the social and political implications of Spencerism. It quickly becomes clear that the concept of “the survival of the fittest” gives license to a multitude of contradictory views and schemes. It could be (and was) used to argue for both the extermination and the assimilation of the Native American population; it was the rhetorical weapon of both the imperialist and the pacifist, the government regulator and the laissez-faire businessman, the eugenicist and the caregiver.

As Worth’s book reaches its climax, this lack of perspective weakens the suspense he works so hard to create. Without occasional authorial guidance, it is difficult to decide which ideas — and thus which thinkers — to root for. We don’t feel the intellectual noose tightening, because we never tally up which logic falls apart, which theories are discredited by closer observation and which are disastrous in actual application. Werth closes with a stirring account of a famous banquet in New York in late November 1882. Scores of America’s leading men jammed into Delmonico’s Restaurant to officially declare Herbert Spencer the greatest thinker of the 19th century. Darwin had been dead only six months, but in the panegyric he prepared for the evening Edward Youmans placed the flag of Spencer’s victory squarely on Darwin’s grave. Charles Darwin, Youmans proclaimed, will remain “the most distinguished naturalist of the age, but Mr. Spencer will abide the honor of complete originality in developing this greatest conception of modern times, if not, indeed, of all time.” Yet Werth never even gestures to the historical irony that it is Darwin whose reputation lives on, while Spencer has been almost entirely forgotten. After all, it was Spencer himself who insisted that survival is prima facie proof of superiority.

BANQUET AT DELMONICO’S

Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America

By Barry Werth

362 pp. Random House. $27

Debby Applegate is the author of “The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Intellectual Selection. Today's Paper|Subscribe